Breakthrough in breast cancer treatment

ATLANTA -- Michele Torres sits in her Atlanta backyard, playing a mean game of tuggie with her Golden Retriever Clementine. She does it even though the pain in her wrists and hands - a side effect from breast cancer treatment, is excruciating.

Eighteen months after her radical mastectomy, she is still undergoing treatment.

"It really takes it to that level of personalized medicine," says Kimberly King Spohn, a genetics counselor at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital.

King-Spohnsays the new information will improve survival rates because doctors can treat women individually. For example one type of breast cancer closely resembles ovarian cancer, so it may respond better to similar treatment.

"Now you can have many women sitting in the same waiting room who all have breast cancer, who will get very different treatments based on the type of breast cancer they have, the stage that they're at, the age they might be at, the characteristics of their breast cancer, so it's going to help them have the best outcome without over treating them, too," she says.

Torres says, "That's awesome. To be able to target a cell and to be able to treat that type of cancer without wiping out the entire body would be amazing."

Torres didn't let the cancer stop her. We followed her to New York where she was runner up in a modeling contest sponsored by O magazine.